1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to editing a visual recording and, in particular, to automatically editing a visual recording to eliminate content that is of unacceptably low quality and/or very little or no interest, automatically summarizing a visual recording in accordance with a format template that imposes a certain overall style to the visual recording summary, and enabling a viewer of a visual recording to provide input which can affect the visual recording content included in an automatically generated summary of the visual recording.
2. Related Art
There are a large number of products aimed at helping people interact with (e.g., view, digitize, edit, organize, share) their home video (or other multimedia content) using a personal computer (e.g., desktop computer, laptop computer). However, those computer-based products are typically very labor intensive and require a significant amount of time to manipulate the video into the desired final form.
For example, one common way in which people desire to interact with home video is to select desirable segments of a video recording and create a new video recording that is shorter in duration than the original video recording, i.e., create a summary of an original video recording. This may be done, for instance, to produce a “highlights” video recording that includes segments of the original video recording that are of particular interest. Sometimes audio content (such as music) is combined with the video recording summary to make viewing of the video recording summary more enjoyable. However, existing computer-based products for facilitating the creation of a video recording summary do not enable automatic creation of a high quality video recording summary, thus making creation of a video recording summary require more time and effort than is desirable.